Wednesday Open Thread | Are They FINALLY Coming for R.Kelly? #MuteRKelly

Women of Color Within Time’s Up Join #MuteRKelly Protest

Time’s Up
Today 8:00am

To Our Fellow Women of Color:

We see you. We hear you. Because we are you.

For too long, our community has ignored our pain. The pain we bear is a burden that too many women of color have had to bear for centuries. The wounds run deep.

As women of color within Time’s Up, we recognize that we have a responsibility to help right this wrong. We intend to shine a bright light on our WOC sisters in need. It is our hope that we will never feel ignored or silenced ever again.

The recent court decision against Bill Cosby is one step toward addressing these ills, but it is just a start. We call on people everywhere to join with us to insist on a world in which women of all kinds can pursue their dreams free from sexual assault, abuse and predatory behavior.

To this end, today we join an existing online campaign called #MuteRKelly.

…………………

Together, we call on the following corporations and venues with ties to R. Kelly to join us and insist on safety and dignity for women of all kinds:

RCA Records: the venerable music label currently produces and distributes R. Kelly’s music;
Ticketmaster: the popular ticketing system is currently issuing tickets for R. Kelly’s show May 11;
Spotify and Apple Music: the popular streaming platforms currently monetizing R. Kelly’s music;
Greensboro Coliseum Complex: the North Carolina venue is currently hosting an R. Kelly concert May 11.

It’s about time.
IT’S ABOUT TIME.
This man has preyed on Black Girls for at least the past 20 years.
And, if his choice of victims hadn’t of been BLACK GIRLS, he would have been IN JAIL.
He knew which victims to choose.
And, for all who went along and helped him cover it up, and smooth it over during the past 20 years….
You will get yours for being complicit in that evil.

This entry was posted in Open Thread, Politics and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

91 Responses to Wednesday Open Thread | Are They FINALLY Coming for R.Kelly? #MuteRKelly

  1. I’m very interested in why now is the time to #MuteRKelly. I’m all for it. It should have bene done a long time ago. He preys on young women. But what’s the call to action is it the fact that we’re just doing a clean out of toxic men in general?

  2. rikyrah says:

    Ivanka can’t be questioned because she’s a woman?😕😕

  3. rikyrah says:

    SHYT.JUST.GOT.REAL.

    It appears China has stopped buying soybeans from the US altogether because of trade fight https://t.co/9ts7ylrTvj

    — CNBC (@CNBC) May 2, 2018

    21 out of the top 25 districts which will be hit by China shutting down buying U.S. soybeans have Republican MoC’s. Imagine that. https://t.co/fxv8UDU0mj

    — Charles Gaba (@charles_gaba) May 2, 2018

    • majiir says:

      The question now is whether the farmers that threw their support behind Trump will still support him as their soybeans died in their fields? They’re about to lose millions and some may lose their farms because of the Talking Yam’s insane, unnecessary aluminum and steel trade tariffs.

  4. rikyrah says:

    Don’t forget….
    He is ‘Presidential Timber’

    The Curve for Unqualified White Men is REAL
    …………………………

    BREAKING: Missouri legislative report indicates Gov. Eric Greitens’ campaign lied about how it got charity donor list.

    — The Associated Press (@AP) May 2, 2018

  5. rikyrah says:

    Talented Teen Trumpeter Just Got Into Juilliard, but His Family Needs Help Covering the $71,000 Price Tag

    Anne Branigin
    Today 9:50am

    William Leathers was just 12 years old when he met legendary jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. That year, William had become the youngest trumpeter accepted into the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra. After hearing William play, Marsalis went up to William’s teacher and said, “This kid belongs at Juilliard.”

    Five years later, William has received that coveted invitation to study at one of the world’s most renowned—and selective—music programs (Marsalis himself is a member of the jazz faculty at the school). But the Canadian teen has one major hurdle: the cost of attendance.

    William is just one of three undergraduate trumpeters to be offered a spot at the prestigious New York City school, CBC.ca reports, but because he is an international student, his family will need to fork over $364,000 in Canadian dollars to cover his tuition and housing for four years (that’s almost $71,000 U.S. dollars per year).

  6. rikyrah says:

    Top 10 Ways Black People Keep Racism Alive, According to Wypipo

    Michael Harriot
    Today 9:45am

    As one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of wypipology, I am constantly searching for ways to translate my studies into real-world applications. Fortunately, there are hundreds of white people who generously take time out of their day to accuse me of being the real racist.

    These scholars keep in constant contact with me to point out how I actually keep racism alive by talking about racism.

    Because I am always open to sharing the wisdom of white America, I wanted to combine the practices that tartar-saucians often describe as “race-baiting” into one top 10 countdown for those who are interested in keeping racism alive.

    10. Play the Victim
    One of the biggest reasons racism exists is that black people love playing the victim. It has been one of the favorite Negro pastimes ever since Africans locked themselves in chains, stowed away on American cruise ships and crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

    9. Engage in Identity Politics
    When black people vote for black candidates, they are playing right into the hands of identity politics. Despite the fact that Donald Trump’s white voters were motivated by race, female voters are encouraged to vote for female candidates, Catholics voted for John F. Kennedy, Mormons voted for Mitt Romney, and politicians openly invoke their Christian identity to appeal to evangelical voters, the moniker of “identity politics” applies only to black voters.

    A majority of white people have never voted for a black presidential candidate. Yet it is black people who keep racism alive because white is not considered a political identity. It is a birthright.

    …………………..

    7. Discuss History
    Black people love bringing up old shit like slavery, history and truth. They will often bring up slavery at inopportune times, like history classes. The only logical reason blacks insist on making every discussion on the Civil War about slavery and white supremacy is that every available historical document about the Civil War actually cites slavery and white supremacy as the reasons for the conflict, and mentions nothing about Southern pride and cultural heritage.

  7. rikyrah says:

    Where Can We Be Black? https://t.co/YBFtOpDkeg via @RollingStone

    — Pretty Foot (@PrettyFootWoman) May 2, 2018

  8. rikyrah says:

    DA PHUQ???

    How Redskins Used Cheerleaders: Topless Photo Shoots and an Uneasy Night Out
    By Juliet Macur

    May 2, 2018

    When the Washington Redskins took their cheerleading squad to Costa Rica in 2013 for a calendar photo shoot, the first cause for concern among the cheerleaders came when Redskins officials collected their passports upon arrival at the resort, depriving them of their official identification.

    For the photo shoot, at the adults-only Occidental Grand Papagayo resort on Culebra Bay, some of the cheerleaders said they were required to be topless, though the photographs used for the calendar would not show nudity. Others wore nothing but body paint. Given the resort’s secluded setting, such revealing poses would not have been a concern for the women — except that the Redskins had invited spectators.

    A contingent of sponsors and FedExField suite holders — all men — were granted up-close access to the photo shoots.

    One evening, at the end of a 14-hour day that included posing and dance practices, the squad’s director told nine of the 36 cheerleaders that their work was not done. They had a special assignment for the night. Some of the male sponsors had picked them to be personal escorts at a nightclub.

  9. rikyrah says:

    From Forever FLOTUS:

    “They will doubt you today and they will doubt you for the rest of your life. When you hit those roadblocks you have to ask for help. No one gets through college on their own. Never be isolated. Everyone struggles. You.Are.Not.Alone.” -First Lady #CollegeSigningDay #ClassOf2018

    — DaniDemocrat (@DaniDemocrat) May 2, 2018

  10. rikyrah says:

    This muthaphucka HERE!

    Mulvaney’s CFPB Considers Moving Staff to the Basement, or Dallas

    May 1, 2018, 3:00 AM CDT Updated on May 1, 2018, 2:42 PM CDT

    Mick Mulvaney says he’s legally barred from shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a regulator he once called a “sick” joke.

    But the agency’s acting director could move dozens of employees to the basement of its Washington headquarters. And he might try to relocate other staff members to Dallas.

    Such options are being proposed by his top aides as Mulvaney seeks to cut spending at the Republican-loathed watchdog by tens of millions of dollars, according to an internal cost-savings analysis that was obtained by Bloomberg News. Another budget-trimming idea: making employees share desks.

  11. rikyrah says:

    APNEWSALERT: Black men arrested at Starbucks settle with Philadelphia for $1 each and a city pledge of $200K for young entrepreneurs.

    — Tom Namako (@TomNamako) May 2, 2018

  12. rikyrah says:

    3 Black Girls Competing to Win Trip to NASA Reportedly Hacked by Racists
    Angela Helm
    Today 11:20am

    Although it has been reported that NASA shut down voting after a team of three black girls was handily winning a contest it sponsored, it appears that what happened was that someone hacked the system to take votes away from the girls, and that’s why the contest was shut down before the stated official voting window had closed.

    Bria Snell, India Skinner and Mikayla Sharrieff, three students at Benjamin A. Banneker Academic High School in Washington, D.C. (full disclosure: my alma mater, Class of ’90), entered NASA Goddard’s Optimus Prime Spinoff Promotion and Research Challenge to win a trip to the esteemed national space program in Greenbelt, Md.

    The three, who volunteer at the Inclusive Innovation Incubator program in D.C., sought to create a technology that would purify public schools’ water systems through filtration jars that filter water while detecting pH imbalances.

    After making it to the semifinal round, the young women were in the lead with 78 percent of the vote (which someone was kind enough to take a screenshot of) when NASA closed voting a day early to “protect the integrity of the vote.”

    ……………………………………………….

    NASA released a statement, which read in part:

    On Sunday, April 29, hackers attempted to change the vote totals in the NASA OPSPARC Challenge, so managers of the challenge decided to end public voting to protect the integrity of the results.

    Before the voting ended, members of the public were using social media to generate support for particular teams in the public voting. NASA supports this kind of community-based effort to encourage students to engage with science, technology, engineering and math and recognizes social media as an important tool for that support. Votes generated this way are legitimate and will be counted. Unfortunately, it was brought to NASA’s attention yesterday that some members of the public used social media, not to encourage students and support STEM, but to attack a particular student team based on their race and encouraged others to disrupt the contest and manipulate the vote, and the attempt to manipulate the vote occurred shortly after those posts. NASA continues to support outreach and education for all Americans, and encourages all of our children to reach for the stars.

  13. rikyrah says:

    Ty Cobb is OUT.

  14. rikyrah says:

    So it turns out that @docusearch has been impersonating people in an effort to illegally obtain their bank acct information, including bank balances. This is criminal conduct and also subjects them to huge civil liability. If you have info, please share.

    — Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) May 2, 2018

  15. rikyrah says:

    Trump’s Direct Assault on Native American Tribal Sovereignty
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    April 24, 201

    Much has been made of Donald Trump’s history of racist statements about African Americans and Latinos. We’ve heard a lot less about his overt racism against Native Americans. But that was a key issue back in the 1990s when Trump used racist tactics against Native American casinos.

    When Trump began clashing with Native American tribes, the stakes for him were huge. He had benefited from Atlantic City’s near-monopoly on East Coast gambling until a change in federal law in 1988 opened the door to more tribal casinos. Trump owned two casinos and opened a third in 1990. In the early 1990s, just as the casinos were emerging from bankruptcy, federal lawmakers were working out how to regulate the fledgling Indian gaming industry

    …………………………………………………..

    And yet the most alarming thing we’ve seen from the Trump administration might still be in its infancy stages. Recently HHS has approved the right of states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. Native Americans have traditionally been exempted from those kinds of requirements. Now the Trump administration has suggested that they will no longer allow that to continue. It is their reasoning on that decision that is monumental.

    The Trump administration contends the tribes are a race rather than separate governments, and exempting them from Medicaid work rules — which have been approved in three states and are being sought by at least 10 others — would be illegal preferential treatment. “HHS believes that such an exemption would raise constitutional and federal civil rights law concerns,” according to a review by administration lawyers…

    The tribes insist that any claim of “racial preference” is moot because they’re constitutionally protected as separate governments, dating back to treaties hammered out by President George Washington and reaffirmed in recent decades under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, including the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations.

    In other words, the Trump administration could be moving in the direction of overturning this country’s treaties with Native American tribes that have existed from our founding as a country. While it is true that the federal government has a horrible track record of abiding by those treaties, no president has ever established policy in direct contradiction to tribal sovereignty.

  16. rikyrah says:

    The Status Anxiety of White Evangelicals
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    April 24, 2018

    White evangelical support for Donald Trump is at an all-time high and perhaps no one expresses the attraction better than Douglas MacKinnon in an victim-drenched article titled, “How long will I be allowed to remain a Christian?

    Recognizing that, Olga Khazan wrote that “status anxiety” is what drove the election of Donald Trump.

    [Diana] Mutz examined voters whose incomes declined, or didn’t increase much, or who lost their jobs, or who were concerned about expenses, or who thought they had been personally hurt by trade. None of those things motivated people to switch from voting for Obama in 2012 to supporting Trump in 2016…

    Meanwhile, a few things did correlate with support for Trump: a voter’s desire for their group to be dominant, as well as how much they disagreed with Clinton’s views on trade and China. Trump supporters were also more likely than Clinton voters to feel that “the American way of life is threatened,” and that high-status groups, like men, Christians, and whites, are discriminated against.

    What are we to make of this when, as MacKinnon himself acknowledged, Christians are still a majority in this country? Here’s how Mutz described what is happening:

    “For the first time since Europeans arrived in this country,” Mutz notes, “white Americans are being told that they will soon be a minority race.”When members of a historically dominant group feel threatened, she explains, they go through some interesting psychological twists and turns to make themselves feel okay again. First, they get nostalgic and try to protect the status quo however they can. They defend their own group (“all lives matter”), they start behaving in more traditional ways, and they start to feel more negatively toward other groups.

  17. rikyrah says:

    Both Parties Didn’t Give Us Trump
    Blaming Trump’s rise on partisan gridlock masks just how ruthlessly the GOP set the stage for his demagoguery.

    by Gilad Edelman
    April 26, 2018

    It may be a dark time for liberal democracy, but it has been a banner year for books about liberal democracy—and the peril it’s in. In our new issue, Rick Valelly reviews books by Yascha Mounk (The People vs. Democracy) and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die), each of which sounds an ominous warning about the trajectory of the American experiment.

    In Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy, Bill Galston strikes a slightly less panicked tone. “Liberal democracy is fragile, constantly threatened, and always in need of repair,” he writes. “But liberal democracy is also strong, because, to a greater extent than any other political form, it harbors the power of self-correction.” This admonition doubles as a useful reminder of why we should care about liberal democracy in the first place.

    Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is also helpfully clear on what populism is. (The right-wing kind, anyway. He doesn’t address the tradition of American progressive populism.) Following the work of Jan-Werner Müller, Galston rejects the idea that the word is merely a label for whatever elites don’t like. Rather, he writes, it “is a form of politics that reflects distinctive theoretical commitments and generates its own political practice.” Populist leaders insist that they alone speak for a mythically homogeneous and morally pure group known as “the people,” whose interests are defined in opposition to some group of “enemies of the people”—typically political or economic elites and immigrants or ethnic minorities. Populism is thus fundamentally illiberal, because it takes aim at the liberties and institutions—courts, the free press, minority protections—that serve as a check against pure majority domination.

    Sound familiar? Galston gives over a chapter of the book to the rise of populism in Europe, but the focus of his analysis is on the conditions that made the Donald Trump disaster possible and how better federal policy can get us out of it. The rise of Trump, he argues, stems primarily from a mix of economic concerns and resentment toward immigrants and cultural elites. The solution, then, is for elites to stop being such snobs, and to adopt economic policy that spreads growth more equitably and immigration reforms that acknowledge white Americans’ understandable (in Galston’s view) concern over cultural displacement and national identity.

  18. rikyrah says:

    House Freedom Caucus Writes Articles of Impeachment Against Rosenstein
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    May 1, 2018

    For a while now I have been suggesting that the initial step Trump will likely take in an attempt to shut down the Mueller investigation is to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosesnstein, who is the Justice Department official overseeing the probe after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself.

    House Republicans like Rep. Devin Nunes, who chairs the intelligence committee, have been hounding Rosenstein to release documents related to the investigation and threatening to impeach him if they are not produced. In each instance, the deputy attorney general has found a way to eventually comply.

    None of that seems to matter to the members of the House Freedom Caucus (HFC).

    Conservative House allies of President Trump have drafted articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the ongoing special counsel probe, setting up a possible GOP showdown over the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election…Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus — led by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a Trump confidant — finalized the draft in recent days.

  19. rikyrah says:

    Ukraine Stopped Cooperating With the Mueller Investigation to Appease Trump
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    May 2, 2018

    A theme that keeps cropping up lately is the way that people who have to deal with Donald Trump—be they foreign governments, congressional Republicans or White House staff—have to deal with his narcissism. To recap, Richard Greene wrote that they have one of two bad choices.

    There are only two ways to deal with someone with [Narcissistic Personality Disorder], and they are both dangerous. There is no healthy way of interacting with someone with this affliction. If you criticize them they will lash out at you and if they have a great deal of power, that can be consequential. If you compliment them it only acts to increase the delusional and grandiose reality the sufferer has created, causing him to be even more reliant on constant and endless compliments and unwavering support.

    That is what comes to mind when I read this bit of a bombshell from Andrew Kramer:

    In the United States, Paul J. Manafort is facing prosecution on charges of money laundering and financial fraud stemming from his decade of work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.

    But in Ukraine, where officials are wary of offending President Trump, not so much. There, four meandering cases that involve Mr. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, have been effectively frozen by Ukraine’s chief prosecutor.

    The cases are just too sensitive for a government deeply reliant on United States financial and military aid, and keenly aware of Mr. Trump’s distaste for the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into possible collusion between Russia and his campaign, some lawmakers say.

  20. Ametia says:
  21. rikyrah says:

    .@MichelleObama will be joined by 8,000 students, and celebrities including Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, @RebelWilson, @JussieSmollett, @jessetyler, @KELLYROWLAND, @Zendaya, and @jameernelson at Temple University today https://t.co/a1CzSNavY8 #CollegeSigningDay pic.twitter.com/7TaPTwEs6t

    — Action News on 6abc (@6abc) May 2, 2018

  22. rikyrah says:

    Trump Lawyers Lack Security Clearances
    May 2, 2018 at 9:41 am EDT

    President Trump’s current team of lawyers lacks the security clearances needed to discuss sensitive issues related to a possible presidential interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

    Trump’s former lead lawyer John Dowd had been the only member of the president’s personal legal team with a security clearance… When Dowd quit in March over disagreements with Trump on legal strategy, Jay Sekulow became the lead lawyer on the investigation and is still waiting for his clearance.

  23. rikyrah says:

    You go and attack a man in a Wheelchair who was minding his own business, and they died….
    You are described as a ‘ Decorated Marine Sniper’.

    Uh huh
    Uh huh
    Look how they buried the CRIME in the story. Why isn’t the CRIME the lead of this story?
    WHITE PRIVILEGE, that’s why.
    ……………………………………..
    Chesterfield man charged in fatal assault of elderly Richmond man was decorated Marine sniper
    By MARK BOWES AND ALI ROCKETT Richmond Times-Dispatch

    A Chesterfield County man charged with attacking two senior citizens in Richmond, killing one of them, was a decorated Marine and scout sniper who testified last year during his sentencing in a firearm case that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and physical injuries that have left him disabled.

    Michael Kevin McReynolds, 43, who police say assaulted the two South Richmond men without any apparent provocation, served in the 1990s and was “highly recommended for re-enlistment” after he was honorably discharged as a sergeant, according to military records in one of his court files in Chesterfield Circuit Court.

    ………………………………………

    Police said that after first knocking 62-year-old Melton Leon Tucker unconscious, McReynolds found Johnny Battle, an 80-year-old in a wheelchair, in the backyard of his nearby home in the 3100 block of Decatur Street.

    Battle was knocked out of his wheelchair and beaten severely, a law enforcement source said, and he died Monday. Two witnesses said the assailant yelled racial epithets and tried to escape in Battle’s car, but it wouldn’t start.

    “He just cold-cocked [Tucker] for no reason,” said Raymond Hudson, a neighbor who witnessed the assault on the first victim. “He drew back and sucker-punched him while Tucker was looking away.”

  24. Ametia says:

    IYM A REAL POTUS

  25. rikyrah says:

    According to @MemPeaceJustice, more than 4,000 black men, women and children were hung/lynched between 1877 and 1950. @kanyewest + @rkelly are using their heinous murders in tweets and press statements. Using our ancestors’ pain as punchlines. pic.twitter.com/DHlwIF5kLc

    — Ava DuVernay (@ava) May 2, 2018

  26. rikyrah says:

    #BREAKING:@DNC MUST INQUIRE from.@TXsecofstate as to why Texas’ UNVERIFIABLE E-Voting Machines ARE PACKED IN DEM STRONGHOLDS#TheResistanceVotes #unhackthevote #DNC #CNN #MSNBC #FoxNews #bbcnewshttps://t.co/3MwUktkl2R

    — Emoluments Clause (@Emolclause) May 1, 2018

  27. rikyrah says:

    You can watch the #CollegeSigningDay livestream LIVE at 11:16AM ET at https://t.co/RCeENWIhcm. Follow us now on Facebook to get ready for tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/oanVcBPZmT

    — Better Make Room 🎓 (@BetterMakeRoom) May 1, 2018

  28. rikyrah says:

    Messages for Manafort, ex-Trump lawyer seen in Trump questions

    Rachel Maddow takes another look at the questions the New York Times published on Monday that reportedly reflect what Robert Mueller wants to know from Donald Trump, and considers who would benefit from the insights available from the leak of those questions.

  29. rikyrah says:

    Rosenstein unintimidated by threats from Congress to remove him

    Rachel Maddow shares video of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s dismissive treatment of a threat by Republicans in Congress to impeach him, and notes that the case those members of Congress are making hinges on the dubious merits of Carter Page.

  30. rikyrah says:

    Vance: Mueller subpoena talk unlikely without Rosenstein blessing

    Joyce Vance, former U.S. attorney, talks with Rachel Maddow about news from the Washington Post that Robert Mueller suggested the possibility of issuing a subpoena for Donald Trump to appear before a grand jury, and points out that Mueller wouldn’t have presented that option without first having cleared with with Rod Rosenstein.

  31. rikyrah says:

    Mueller floated possibility of issuing subpoena to Trump: WaPo

    Carol Leonnig, reporter for The Washington Post, talks with Rachel Maddow about new reporting that Robert Mueller threatened the possibility of using a subpoena to get answers from Donald Trump if Trump would not submit for an interview voluntarily.

    • Ametia says:

      Point proven here: white folks use the po po as modern day slave-catchers.

    • Liza says:

      It’s interesting how you look at her picture and there is nothing unusual. But underneath that highlighted hair lurks an evil, wretched, racist bitch. Once identified, they should have to wear a sign.

  32. rikyrah says:

    They support TREASON
    So, no…any outrage from them should be discarded

    https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/991514751187472384?s=19

  33. rikyrah says:

    Good Morning Everyone 😄😄😄

Leave a Reply